We gather the views of CIO Asia's extended network of IT security experts and contributors to predict the future of data centre security

Twice every year, data centre provider Telin Singapore hosts a landmark gathering of technology experts, its customers and partners, to garner their viewpoints and current requirements regarding the current state of the cloud and colocation data centres.

This event aims to broaden and deepen Telin Singapore's understanding of the industry so it can provide better services in various areas, including provisioning, security, and managed services options.

The next roundtable, scheduled for November 2017, aims to address what exactly is a secure data centre? Is it the physical premises, the security hardware, the software, or the operating procedures that make a data centre security?

To provide some food for thought in advance of the event, we have gathered views of CIO Asia's extended network of IT security experts and contributors. Here's what they had to say:

The Latest Cyber Attacks show why the Cloud is Safer by David Linthicum, InfoWorld

Computer systems from the Ukraine to the United States were affected by the Petya cyber-attack earlier this year, similar to the WannaCry ransomware before it.

The WannaCry ransomware took advantage of vulnerabilities in the older versions of Windows that allowed the infection to spread. All someone needed to do was click a malicious link and-bang!-they were infected. That is, if they hadn't installed the patches and updates.

These attacks are a reminder of why the cloud is a safer place to do your computing.

Using the cloud makes you less likely to get attacked and breached. The layers of security in the cloud are more than a deterrent for most attacks. The cloud providers proactively monitor these clouds, and they quickly spot and quickly block them. And they automatically apply operating system, application, and service patches and fixes are automatically behind the scenes.

Extremely few IT organizations do the same. The cost of security is just too much for most enterprises to bear, and most can't keep up with all that needs to be done to keep their systems and users secure enough from WannaCry, Petya, and other malware that shut down systems.

Whilst the cloud can suffer from outages, yes, just like enterprise IT systems. But no major cloud provider has fallen victim to all the malware attacks of the last few years. What does that tell you?

There are plenty of complicated documents that can guide companies through the process of designing a secure data center, but what should be the high-level goals for making sure that security for data centers is built into the designs, instead of being an expensive or ineffectual afterthought?